Presentation by Russell Howell Reed (A.B. '20)
Abstract: Over the past century, American geography has increasingly aligned with technical and "objective" methodologies, deepening our empirical understanding of the world. Paradoxically, this quantitative turn has coincided with an unprecedented degradation of the human-environment relationship manifesting today in the form of climate crisis. This was not a natural methodological evolution but a deliberate abandonment of critical geography that began at postwar Harvard, where the discipline’s perceived political threat led to its swift disbandment in 1948. If geography was once considered influential enough to be forcibly dismantled, it holds power worth reclaiming. This seminar explores the transformative potential of an interpretive and imaginative geography—one that recognizes the unique value of a geographic practice that is both technical and critical, leveraging its position between the natural and social sciences to illuminate truths otherwise overlooked. Geography plays with the variables of time, revealing how past actions shape the present and how the present may give rise to infinite futures not yet foretold. To ask, "How was this world built?" implies that there is another world to be built. Geographers are uniquely positioned to reveal what that world might look like and how it can be built. Will we rise to the challenge?
Bio: Russell Howell Reed is a conservationist, climate activist, and writer whose diverse work spans six continents and the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. He is the founder and principal of Geographer, a forthcoming creative studio fostering cultural engagement in the environmental movement, and formerly served as the conservation manager of Virunga National Park in Congo-Kinshasa and a founding member of Sway, winner of the TOM FORD Plastic Innovation Prize. Russell is a prominent youth climate justice activist, most recently spearheading the ongoing NDC Youth Clause campaign while leading youth delegations to COP16 and COP29 for Nile Rodgers' We Are Family Foundation. In 2020, he graduated magna cum laude with Highest Honors in Geography & Development from Harvard College, earning the first geography degree awarded since the department's dissolution in 1948. He then received the inaugural M.Phil. in Anthropocene Studies from the University of Cambridge as the Paul Williams Scholar.
Location - 61 Kirkland Street - Room 202
LOCATION:61 Kirkland Street - Room 202, Cambridge, (2 blocks from Harvard campus) STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20250408T160000Z DTEND:20250408T170000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR